ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Category: Volume 9 Issue 1

Line drawing

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 by Nicholas C. Morgan ·

Forging a Public Sphere: José Leonilson in the Folha de São Paulo

Between 1991 and 1993, the artist José Leonilson contributed a weekly illustration to Folha de São Paulo, Brazil’s highest circulation daily newspaper. This article argues that these drawings inserted a minoritarian voice into the public sphere in a way that contested its normative operations by emphasizing the micropolitical and the intimate, often through allegory. Some of the illustrations address AIDS, to which Leonilson succumbed two weeks after the last was published, and this article situates his work in relation to the intertwining discourses around sexuality, public health and media in Brazil at the time. What emerges is a conception of … Read more

Photograph of back of woman with long hair

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 by Fares Chalabi ·

Art as Resistance in Postwar Lebanon

This article attempts to read a number of contemporary Lebanese artists by using the Foucauldian-Deleuzian concept of regimes of visibility. The article shows how a specific aesthetical problematic pertaining to Post-War Lebanon unfolds in the electronic and digital regimes of visibility. Last, the article contrast the Lebanese artists with other artists operating in Europe and the U.S and propose other artistic strategies when dealing with the same regimes of visibility.

Print Content / Volume 9 Issue 1

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 by John Roberts ·

After Moscow Conceptualism: Reflections on the Center and Periphery and Cultural Belatedness

Conceptual art is not only subject to a striking unevenness and a range of diverse forms across national territories during its emergence, but each national-cultural context in which it emerges is also exposed to the general belatedness of conceptual art’s relationship to its own avant-garde past. Each national-cultural formation was working with, and through, very different cultural and historical materials on the basis of very different kinds of awareness of the avant-garde past and the recent conceptual present. This article addresses this unevenness and belatedness by looking at the case of Moscow conceptualism in the 1970s and 1980s. In a … Read more

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 by Adriana Michéle Campos Johnson ·

Art and Our Surrounds: Emergent and Residual Languages

This essay undertakes a review of recent books by T.J. Demos (Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016) and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017)) and Jens Andermann (Tierras en trance: Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje (Lands Entranced: Art and Nature after Landscape, 2018)). Demos and Andermann participate in the paradigm shift taking place under the name of eco-criticism, forging connections between the debates around environmental crisis and the fields in which they have written and published previously – art criticism and visual culture and Latin American literary and cultural studies, respectively. Both … Read more

Overlapping landscape photes

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Free Content © 2020 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Daniele Genadry ·

The Material Conditions of Representation

Seethrough Mountain interrupts this journal through a physical shift in paper, texture and scale, and thereby proposes a pause or possible site of hesitation where the reader can consider the qualitative and material aspect of what they hold in their hands. The two works, a drawing and a constructed photograph, each creating the illusion of transparency, orient the reader’s attention to the material support of the images, and institute a shock, so that the reader might see through the representations to their material conditions. Seethrough Mountain draws attention to the nature of varying forms of information, and proposes that both … Read more

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Free Content © 2020 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Jing Cao ·

Introduction to “A Conversation between Chinese Artists and Mexican Painter David Alfaro Siqueiros”

In October 1956, the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros traveled Beijing and engaged in two dialogues with artists from the Chinese Artists’ Association. His visit came at an inflection point in China’s foreign and cultural policy. As Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated, China used cultural diplomacy to cultivate relationships with unaligned countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. China’s cultural policy mirrored this shift by relaxing its adherence to Soviet-style Socialist Realism and promoting new stylistic practices, including a revival of ink painting techniques. This policy shift re-animated a debate among Chinese artists over the best mode of representation for socialist art, with … Read more

Print Content / Volume 9 Issue 1

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Free Content © 2020 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Feng Xiangsheng ·

A Conversation between Chinese Artists and Mexican Painter David Alfaro Siqueiros

In October 1956, the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros traveled Beijing and engaged in two dialogues with artists from the Chinese Artists’ Association. His visit came at an inflection point in China’s foreign and cultural policy. As Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated, China used cultural diplomacy to cultivate relationships with unaligned countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. China’s cultural policy mirrored this shift by relaxing its adherence to Soviet-style Socialist Realism and promoting new stylistic practices, including a revival of ink painting techniques. This policy shift re-animated a debate among Chinese artists over the best mode of representation for socialist art, with … Read more